Moon Duo...Emerson, how do you tell them apart?

Any music review that requires me to read Emerson is a good time...

Moon Duo
Circles
Sacred Bones

Moon Duo, like its half sibling Wooden Shjips, grinds out grooves that are both tightly coiled and expansive, its repetitive measures circling in an endlessly rolling boundary which is, nonetheless, occasionally an entryway to otherworldly sensation. The idea of limits that turn into doorways and doorways that lead to more limits runs all through Moon Duo’s transcendental reveries. So, it makes sense, in a way, that Moon Duo guitarist-singer Ripley Johnson would gravitate towards one of the original Transcendentalists, Ralph Waldo Emerson.


In his essay “Circles,” Emerson posits perception as an endless series of concentric circles, the consciousness at the center constantly forced to break through what it sees as boundaries into the next realm of knowing. Says Emerson, “The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end.” Says Moon Duo’s Johnson on the Emerson-inspired Circles, “O is where the time seems to never end, when all the past is just present again.”

More


Here's "Sleepwalker"


Also, you can hear their whole set from the 2011 Primavera Sound Festival at the Free Music Archive.

I'm interviewing Mirah and the lights go out

So, basically, everything is fine here. We had some very high winds last night and the power was out for about four hours, but that happens all the time, even without hurricanes...it is nothing like those photos of NYC, Atlantic City, Ocean City etc. here. We were lucky.

And in fact, extra lucky, because I had been trying to get hold of Mirah for more than a week in order to do a Philadelphia Weekly feature on her, and it finally came through late yesterday afternoon (it's due tomorrow, or at least it was before the world went underwater). Weirdly, I was on the phone with Mirah talking about her upcoming tour when the lights went out here. She was telling me about the older songs that she almost has to do, every time she does a live show, or else her fans get very disappointed. One of them, appropriately enough, was "Cold Cold Water."




I hope you are all well and safe.

Hurricane Sandy...Hurricane Bill

So there's a new Big Dipper album now, for the first time in 22 years, It's called Big Dipper Crashes on the Platinum Planet and it's out on Almost Ready label November 27th.

I have to say, I think it's not quite as good as the early stuff, but still pretty good. The main principals are still involved: Gary Waleik, Bill Goffrier. the sound is very much the same, leaning heavily catchy melodies, chime-y guitars, a goofy sense of humor. There's a song called "Hurricane Bill" that I would definitely put up today, in honor of our extreme weather, but they're old-fashioned and appear not to be giving any tracks away on Soundcloud and/or Youtube, so you will have to settle for a very old video of "Faith Healer."



I did an extended feature on Big Dipper for Dusted a couple of years ago.

We are all fine so far. It hasn't even really started raining, and we are 100 miles from the storm surge. The most that could happen to us, probably, is losing power and maybe some trees down. We're on a hill, so it doesn't usually flood here. Some roads may wash out. We'll be okay, but may possibly lose internet at some point.

Anyway, if you're in Sandy's path, stay safe and do what they tell you.

She lives in an airport

Hey look, it's new Guided By Voices! The third full-length this year!

It's pretty good!



(It's the end of October so I had to use up my exclamation point quota.)

Happy Saturday. About time for pizza, I'd say.

FAC. Dance 2...party like it's 1982

I so, so, so enjoyed this one...

VARIOUS ARTISTS
Fac. Dance 02
(Strut)

The second in Strut's survey of Factory Records' dance-electronic side goes deeper into the well of early 1980s dub-funk-world-punk, revisiting Fac. Dance 01 favorites like A Certain Ratio, Durutti Column, ESG and 52nd Street and branching out into the wilder, southern-hemisphere-sampling hybrids like Fadela and X-O-Dus.

The material comes from the first half of the 1980s, the same period during which most of Joy Division reformed as New Order and established it dark, dance-oriented new sound. Yet at the same time, lots of other loosely aligned bands were attempting the same alchemy, splicing the knotty, twitchy dissonance of post-punk to sinuous, body-moving grooves. Consider the Wake's 1983 "The Host," a knife-edge blend of shudder and sigh, dark blasts of synthesizer flaring up from a sensualist's bedrock of bass and drums (that's Bobby Gillespie, pre-Jesus & Mary Chain, on drums), and Caesar McInulty murmuring alienated phrases over. It is nearly eight minutes long, an endless, hypnotic, hip-centric groove that has just enough punk disaffection to give it bite.

More

I wander into a rave...am assaulted by hair

I mentioned my Divine Fits adventure earlier in the week, and now the complete report is up at Blurt. I am an idiot. What can I say?

How Not to Review a Divine Fits Concert

I spent all of last Friday night at the wrong show.

I'd planned to catch the Divine Fits, the new sparse, electro-funky super collaboration between Spoon's Britt Daniel, Wolf Parade's Dan Boecker, New Bomb Turks' Sam Brown and Alexi Taylor. I'd been listening all week to A Thing Called Divine Fits, in fact, and was kind of excited about seeing it in real life. But oh, terrible thing, Divine Fits was downstairs and Conspirator, a Disco Biscuits electronic dance side project, was upstairs, and I followed the crowds without thinking, up to the big room, where a big synthesized bass drum was thumping already, four on the floor loud enough to rattle your esophagus...as it would thump for the rest of the night. I stayed up there for roughly three hours, in the vain hope that, somehow, what I was hearing would align with what I expected to hear, and sadly, figured it out only around midnight, when Divine Fits had already finished.

How could I be so stupid? How could I not know the difference? Here are seven excuses, all pretty lame:

1. A Thing Called Divine Fits is by far the most electronically rooted thing that Britt Daniel has ever done...maybe he really likes drum ‘n bass and wanted to tour with bands like that?
2. The opening band is something called Strobe Horse, which is a mostly electronic local band...the kind of outfit that could very well use laptops and keyboards and drum machines.
3. There's a drum kit behind the mountains of speakers, which I look at hopefully throughout the evening, as one act after another relies on programmed and sampled beats. (Conspirator uses live drums.)
4. If Britt Daniel were ever to dress up in sun-glasses, a furry top-hat and feather boa, don't you think he'd look sort of like this?

More

1-800 Band

No reviews running today, nothing exciting coming in the mail, so time to start trolling the WFMU heavily played list for bloggable ideas...and I find this.

The 1-800 Band is a four-piece out of Brooklyn pursuing a very catchy, keyboard-leavened variety of garage rock. Kind of basic, but super fun...



Like this one a lot.


There are a whole bunch of live tracks (which, honestly, sound about as good productinon-wise as the video) at the Free Music Archive.